This post has a similar message to The Stigma Against Being Wrong
At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”
At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.
Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.
But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.
In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.
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